MariaDB Names Jon Bakke as Chief Revenue Officer

Database industry veteran brings decades of experience from Oracle and MarkLogic that will drive accelerated growth for the fastest growing open source database

MENLO PARK, Calif. and HELSINKI, Finland – May 16, 2017 – MariaDB® Corporation today announced the appointment of Jon Bakke as Chief Revenue Officer. Bakke will be responsible for leading the sales, consulting, support and training teams, and driving rapid global growth.

Bakke brings more than 20 years of database and operational expertise with a demonstrated track record in innovation, customer service, solution development, delivery and global team leadership. Most recently, he led worldwide sales and field operations at MarkLogic, a NoSQL database company, where he nearly doubled revenues, achieved a 90 percent renewal rate and helped the company reach unicorn status. Prior to MarkLogic, Bakke spent nine years at Oracle focused on growing public sector accounts.

“The database market is expected to reach $50 billion this year alone,” said Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB Corporation. “Relational continues to be the database of choice to support the majority of applications, and with the shift away from the high costs and vendor lock-in associated with proprietary databases to open source, we are in a prime position to capture increasing market share. Jon’s deep database expertise and knowledge on how to build valuable customer experiences will help us reach new growth milestones.”

Bakke joins MariaDB following record enterprise adoption, the successful completion of its first global user conference, and an additional €25 million funding from the European Investment Bank (EIB). Announced last week, the EIB funding will support product innovation and growth of MariaDB’s sales and marketing teams across Europe, America and Asia.

“I’m excited to join MariaDB with its long history of innovation and proven enterprise technology,” said Jon Bakke, Chief Revenue Officer, MariaDB Corporation. “Companies across every industry are evolving their infrastructure to support modern architectures like cloud and analytics. This presents an incredible opportunity to help customers drive their businesses forward using MariaDB.”

MariaDB is quickly replacing traditional database software. According to DB-Engines, MariaDB has jumped in popularity compared to legacy databases like Oracle and MySQL, which has seen steady decreases. A recent OpenStack survey revealed a long-term trend of MySQL deployments moving to MariaDB. Available widely in major Linux distributions or deployed in any cloud environment, MariaDB is rapidly becoming the open source database standard for the modern enterprise.

About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Corporation is the company behind MariaDB, the fastest growing Open Source database. MariaDB is the default in major Linux distributions like Red Hat and SUSE, which in total reaches more than 60 million. MariaDB can be deployed in a hybrid, public or private cloud with technologies like Docker, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and OpenStack. Over the past year, the company expanded its product portfolio to include MariaDB MaxScale and MariaDB ColumnStore, enabling a broader range of use cases across the enterprise. MariaDB, with its commitment to community innovation and customer success, is the leading database preferred by developers and trusted by enterprises.